Maintained by the Space Physics Data Facility (SPDF) at NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center. Documentation includes CDF User's Guide and complete list of APIs and their descriptions in reference manuals for the supported programming languages. Source code for the CDF software package is also freely available.Īvailable from. Specifications of the format and the APIs in Java, C, and Fortran are freely available. The Library of Congress Recommended Format Specifications for Datasets lists the CDF file format as an acceptable format.įully documented. Has several versions not documented separately here. Generally used for middle- and final-state archiving.

CDF files created on any given platform can be transported to any other platform to which CDF is ported and used with any CDF tools or layered applications.ĬDF Version 2.7 and up contain support for Java Application Program Interfaces (APIs), in addition to the C and Fortran APIs of earlier versions. The application developer is insulated from the actual physical file format for reasons of conceptual simplicity, device independence, and future expandability.

This self-describing property allows CDF to be a generic, data-independent format that can store data from a wide variety of disciplines. In addition to the actual data being stored, CDF also stores user-supplied descriptions of the data, known as metadata.

The basic component of CDF is a software programming interface that is a device-independent view of the CDF data model. Draft status: Partial (low priority for LC)ĬDF is a conceptual data abstraction for storing, manipulating, and accessing multidimensional data sets.

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